Save Time, Improve Focus on Your Business: The Advantages of Outsourcing

The advantages of outsourcing for small businesses are significant. Hiring outsourced resources can help your business grow. A review of the history of outsourcing shows that business owners are able to lower their labor costs and contract specialists in functional business processes. In today’s economic environment, all businesses are looking to contain costs yet improve services; outsourcing can help them achieve those objectives. Small businesses are also looking at outsourced services to help their business growth.

How to manage your small business for business growth without increasing your employees? How to keep focused on your defined business scope and manage the day-to-day business activities? Outsource needs that you can’t meet from within the business.

Outsourcing is about hiring outside resources or specialists to do what you can’t, or don’t want to, do yourself. You might not have the skills, experience or education to do everything that needs to get done. Or you might need more help than your existing staff can provide. For example, you might want to do a telemarketing blitz for the introduction of your new product. You don’t have the internal resources to do it efficiently, so you hire a call center in Las Vegas to do the calling. Or you might be able to do the business accounting yourself but you don’t have time in your day, so you outsource the bookkeeping.

Outsourcing specialized services can help your business contain and minimize payroll costs, reduce the need to recruit more staff and to manage more staff, and improve your utilization of resources (people, equipment, time and money). There are excellent benefits and paybacks to contracting out services, particularly highly specialized services.

Common functional areas include accounting, employee benefits, call centers, help centers, warranty centers, human resources (such as training, recruiting, salary research and more), information technology, landscaping and grounds maintenance, shipping, legal support and outsource legal research, maintenance, marketing, sales agents, public relations, management consultants for specific projects, manufacturing, waste removal and recycling, transcription services, office or virtual assistants, and much more.

When the cost of outsourcing grows to be significantly higher than the cost of additional staff, you will need to assess the cost/benefit relationship for outsourcing. If the work you are outsourcing is fairly broad or general, it might be time to hire full time staff. However if the work that you outsource is fairly specialized (for example, legal services, accounting services, IT services) then it might not make sense to hire a generalist to do a little bit of everything rather than a specialist who can do a lot of focused work. Whenever you make the decision to add full time staff you need to ensure that there is a cost, a time, and an effectiveness improvement in bringing the work back in-house.

There are a number of excellent reasons to outsource. The best reason to outsource is that by outsourcing you can focus on what you do best. Hopefully your best includes running your business; sometimes it doesn’t – if that’s the case recognize what your strengths are and outsource areas where you are weak – you don’t always have time to invest in learning and minimizing weaknesses. Always balance the decision to hire or to outsource against what you might lose or gain (money, results, time, etc.).

As a small business owner or manager, you are focused on getting, and improving, your growth. The advantages of outsourcing are significant: save money and time and improve results. And use more proven strategies and resources from the More For Small Business site to better lead your business.